This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

It’s taken as grim gospel in this country that English-speaking Canadians would rather see a movie made in Hollywood than one filmed in their own backyard.

French-speaking Quebecers, on the other hand, are believed to prefer francophone movies with homegrown directors and talent that nurture cultural identity.

These assumptions are wrong, according to an important new study by
Telefilm Canada
, the federal film funder and promoter. Laughter, not patriotism, drives the movie choices of most Canadians, the study found.

Rather than just talk about the challenges of Canadian film, Telefilm looked into the situation, with an eye to actually doing something about it.

It commissioned an online panel survey this past spring of 1,800 Canadians, ranging in age from 15 to 65 (some were older), to get a better idea of what motivates moviegoers, beyond Brad Pitt and buttered popcorn. All of the respondents had to have seen at least one film in the past year and be able to speak at least one of Canada’s two official languages.

Article Continued Below

The results exploded myths and indicated some interesting trends.

On the myth-busting front, one big canard that died was the notion that anglophone Canadians shun Canuck films because they deem them inferior to Hollywood ones, while francophone Quebecers embrace their domestic content for exactly the opposite reason.

The study showed that genre — with comedy the most popular — is the main driver for movie choices made by both English and French moviegoers. (Story topic and casting were the second and third major drivers, respectively.)

Way down the nine-category list of reasons for heading to the multiplex is “that the film is Québécois/Canadian” (No. 7), which ranks just ahead of “the origin of the film” (No. 8). Dead last for reasons was “the producer” (No. 9).

In other words, Canadians of all stripes mainly want to laugh when they go to see a movie, and they don’t particularly care where the film comes from.

This is good news if you’re an exhibitor or distributor who fears that Canadians might have some kind of bias against their own country’s film fare. Canadians will go and see Canadian films if you can persuade them that they’ll enjoy it, and also if they have access to it. Canuck films have a tough time getting theatre space.

“We don’t have a quality issue, we have a promotion issue,” said Dave Forget, Telefilm’s director of business affairs and certification, who presented the survey to the press this week. In a previous life, Forget worked for 20 years in film distribution, including management stints with 20th Century Fox and Alliance Atlantis Releasing.

These findings were borne out when the survey takers mentioned the names of 15 films from the past 10 years, a mix of Canadian and U.S. titles.

The study also looked into movie-watching habits, asking people how frequently they see movies, and what “platform” — that’s everything from movie theatre to TV to cell phone or tablet — that they view them on.

They identified four distinct groups. The two largest ones, called Casual Consumers (49 per cent of the population) and Active at-Home (21 per cent), are mostly people in their 50s and older who rarely go to movie theatres and prefer to watch movies on TV, if they watch them at all.

The remaining two groups, called Connected Consumers (19 per cent) and Superviewers (11 per cent), are mainly people in their 20s and 30s who are avid moviegoers, not just at theatres but on any platform. The survey showed that just six percent of Canadians are currently viewing movies on smartphones and tablets, but that’s expected to change dramatically in years to come.

Forget says he showed the findings to a Canadian filmmaker, whom he didn’t name, and the response to that six-percent figure was, “I guess the challenge for me is going to be to make my content more compelling on a small screen.”

Overall, however, the study found that Canadians love seeing movies, any way they can see them, and they’re eager to see even more.

“It’s not that they see more films on other platforms instead of seeing them in a cinema,” Forget said.

“They see more films, writ large, and they’re seeing more films on all platforms. The appetite for movie-going is there.”

This is music to the ears of
Cineplex Inc.
, Canada’s largest movie exhibition company. The firm is already aggressively pursuing an all-platform, all-the-time strategy, Cineplex Entertainment spokesman Mike Langdon told me.

“The movie business is very strong in Canada — 2012 was our best year ever as a company, and in the third quarter of this year we set an all-time record for attendance, with 19 million guests.”

The company is introducing many new features to woo every type of moviegoers, including older ones who rarely venture into a theatre. The company is expanding its VIP cinemas, which ups the comfort factor, and it fills many seats with its
Front Row Centre
program that entices people with such non-traditional cinema offerings as operas, stage plays and sporting events. Once hooked, the “Casual Consumer” and “Active at-Home” person identified in the Telefilm survey often come back to see a regular movie.

Cineplex is also not ceding any ground to mobile entertainment. It has a
Cineplex store
for DVD, Blu-ray and online streaming of movies for sale and rental, and it recently introduced a
Superticket
that offers a theatrical viewing combined with a future online download of some popular films.

“We really want to be the go-to source for Canadians, whether that’s in the theatre, in the home or on the go,” Langdon said.

The Telefilm study is far from perfect. It’s maddeningly imprecise about ages, for example, and those four viewing categories could also use some clarification. It’s simply a snapshot of how things are in 2013, and Telefilm hopes to do more such surveys at roughly two-year intervals.

The trends will be interesting to watch — Telefilm may do a film festival survey, too — and hopefully a few more Canadian movie myths will bite the dust.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com